Skull and Bones - Baffling Mediocrity

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All they had to do was take Black Flag, remove the hoods, the hidden blades, all the stuff that made it Assassin's Creed, sprinkle on a little added depth to replace the stuff they took out, and BOOM perfect pirate game. I don't understand how they could've screwed this up.

Skull & Barebones, amirite?

Ubisoft had the recipe for cake and made buttered toast...

They had the formula, they had the fanbase, they had the experience... This is like failing on test where you already know the answers.

It isn’t disappointing if you didn’t expect it to be good to begin with.

No my friend. This isn't disappointing or baffling at all. This is exactly what you would expect from a quadruple A game.

I have a f2p pirate game on my phone that looks and plays EXACTLY like this! Only difference is, in the f2p game, you can board ships and fight.

This thing is $70.. the audacity!

THE CANNONS DOESN'T EVEN TURN, THE SHOTS JUST EXIT THE BARREL AT AN ANGLE..... Jesus christ this is terrible

Back up. There’s no boarding enemy ships at all? But that’s the best part of ship fighting. Grabbing a rope and swinging onto the enemy ship to fight. When I did that with Edward Kenway in Black flag, I felt like Jack sparrow in a video game. Skull and bones took a massive step backwards. Wow. Plus the whale hunting in Black flag and rogue was amazing. It was really cool that we were able to hunt the white whale(i’m a big Herman Melville fan lol 😂)

No melee combat is wild, that was half the game in Black Flag

"Baffling mediocrity" is a description fitting to most AAA titles for past 10 years. Yet, developers want more and more money, for less quality.

This is what happens when you drag your feet for 10 years.

The 4th A in quadruple A is "Annnd Refund it"

Devs make Blackflag II Executives: We can't monetise that. Take X out and put in Y. Devs: But Y is an inferior system and removing X actively detracts from other connected systems. Executives: Shareholders. Devs: But nobody will buy it. Executives: They will, because we allocated 50% of the total budget to marketing. Devs: This is a really bad idea. I work on these for a living, that's literally what you hire me to do. From a standpoint of expertise, you're making a terrible decision. I'm trying to help you. Executives. You, and your entire team, are fired.

"It's a sadface out of 10." Made me laugh 😂

I think this was a salvage job. It most likely had a way more ambitious premise in the beginning, and at some point they decided it wasnt worth the money and time they were spending. Then they threw some interns and inexperienced employees at it just to connect all the dots and get it in a shape it could be released just so it could at least make some of their money back

Wasn't skull and bones developed by a Singapore studio? Ubisoft opened a studio to get some government subsidies but it ended costing Ubisoft more in the long run, i.e. 10 years. I work in software development and I visited Singapore for 3 months, saw how they work there. They "work" until 22h to get bonus pay, but all of the developers, mostly from India, leave after 6 months, so there's no continuity in development work. I put "work" in quotes because one of the screen share sessions the dev had a mouse jiggler app on his desktop, probably to mimic that he was available and hard at work. Nothing really ever got done, just rework after rework. I can relate to this, Ubisoft just cut their losses and released skull and bones to be done with it and get out of the Singapore.

Whoever thought to take swashbuckling completely out of a damn PIRATE GAME should never be allowed to touch game development for life.